buter's BABY blog

-----Original Message-----
From: butercup
Sent: Thursday, 24 May 2007 10:22 AM
To: My mate


Mate,

So seeing as I've stalled on reading Moby Dick ... maybe I should get it sent to my phone instead ;)

-----Original Message-----
From: Buter's mate
Sent: Thursday, 24 May 2007 10:30 AM
To: butercup

"stalled" eh? that puts you in some good company I expect: it's probably one of the most famous books that no one has ever finished ;) (along with "Ulysses")

At what point does a book become "never finished" as opposed to "still being read, just on the shelf for a while"? I suppose if you discount textbooks, the "never finished" category must be used for books that you don't find appealing or enthralling enough to even want to finish. Now I'm one of those people who will stick with a book for a while to see if it gets better, but even so there's a fair list of books I've never finished .. which I will admit to, for the first time, right here:

• Underworld by Don DeLillo - I got stuck at the decades-long description of the baseball game at the start.
• The Bride Stripped Bare by "anonymous" - hilariously, even the wikipee entry isn't finished.
• The Silmarillion by JRR Tolkein - sorry, but I loathed history in high school so why would I want to read more history, even if it is about Middle-Earth ...
• Swann's Way by Proust - oh, I tried so hard. I even went so far as to read Alain de Botton's How Proust Can Change Your Life for encouragement. (yes, I did finish that one!) I've decided Proust changed my life, without having to read the whole book. Phew ..
• Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad - I think I started this 3 or 4 times and just kept giving up. Since it turns out that the one person who kept recommending it to me had almost nothing in common with me I probably should have given up sooner.
• A Song of Stone by Iain Banks - in fact most of Iain Banks' fiction or sci-fi work just turned me off. The only one I remember finishing (and reading again, incidentally) was Against a Dark Background.
• Perfume by Patrick Suskind - just "eeeeew", really.
• The Bible - since I'm being honest, I really tried to read this, I even got a "Read the Bible in a year"guide but it still ended up on the shelf as a "thing to do later". Maybe next year.
  

Ok, that's probably enough reminiscing, after all it's not really all that much fun to think about books that never made it for me .. time to go finish off The Decameron.